Free Content and Linkbuilding with Brad Callen’s SEOLinkVine

Free Content and Linkbuilding with Brad Callen’s SEOLinkVine

Call us intrigued…We just signed up for Brad Callen’s SEOLinkVine service.

The service is about $70 a month and provides you the ability to receive free articles to load up your blogs with content – AND the ability to distribute articles for publishing throughout the SEOLinkVine blog network. The concept is brilliant. Hopefully, the execution is as well. We’re testing it out now.

Our Opinion of SEOLinkVine So Far

The service has two sides…free content and content distribution ostensibly for the purpose of link-building. We’ll evaluate the pros and cons of each.

Free Content for Your Website / Blog

As any SEO guru will tell you, one of the keys to ranking well with a website is site content. You need quality, keyword-rich – and unique – content and you need a lot of it.

The Pros:

SEOLinkVine certainly provides you with access to a lot of content – up to four new articles a day. You also have options related to what kind of content you accept.

First, you can choose by category (and there appear to be quite a few) what kind of topics you wish to receive articles for inclusion on your blog.

You can automate approval or manually accept or decline postings. In addition, SEOLinkVine provides article authors the ability to spin articles to create unique content (more on this when we address the article distribution side of things). As a publisher of content, you can filter posts based on the level of article spinning completed by the author. The higher the level (with a max of 30%), the less frequent you’ll receive articles – I assume because there are simply less articles with sufficient spinning available in the system.

Once you accept an article, you cannot, by user agreement either edit the articles or add no-follow attributes to the embedded links.

The Cons:

Like with any other content you receive (paid or otherwise) you have virtually no control over the quality of the content. Typos, grammatical errors, etc. are all in the mix. So far, the quality appears to be superior to hiring overseas writers to generate 500 word articles for a nickel a word, but we’ll see.

And on at least one occasion, one of my blogs received a blank article. No content, just a title. I’m checking with SEOLinkVine to see what their policy is on this. I’d like to just delete it.

Article Distribution and Linkbuilding:

As any SEO guru will also tell you, another one of the keys to ranking well with a website is quality backlinks. Since sometimes we don’t always have access to free, high-PR quality backlinks, most do-it-yourselfers will simply go for quantity and hope for the best on the quality side of things.

The Pros:

Adding articles and even spinning them is about as easy as it gets with SEOLinkVine. Creating 15 variations of a single article took me less than 10 minutes and produces a far superior end result that semi-automated article spinning software that we seen.

The stats and reporting available is simple, but very effective so that you can track the fruits of your labor over time.

The Cons:

There is no guarantee that your article will be accepted by other blogs in the network. So far I have submitted 7 unique articles in four distinct categories – complete with extensive spinning – and only two of the articles have been accepted for publication in the last 24 hours. We’ll continue to track this.

I’m not entirely convinced that the SEOLinkVine blog network is as large as advertised. To be fair, there is no advertising copy that actually refers to the size of the network, but as with any Brad Callen product everything is presented as being the biggest and best. The service appears to have been launched in April of 2010 so perhaps it simply has not hit critical mass yet. We’ll continue to track this too.

First Impressions

I really like the idea of complementing a new blog with free, targeted content in order to take a site from tiny to large in a relatively short time. It may also prove useful as a tool for clients who want to grow their website without investing too much on monthly SEO and content generation. Accept one post a day from SEOLinkVine and add one post of your own every month or so. Might just work.

I am a bit disappointed so far with the article distribution side of things. This aspect of the service is obviously the reason why most would subscribe to SEOLinkVine in the first place. Hopefully, the acceptance rate for new articles improves. If not, this may be a short-lived experiment.

Second Impressions after 3 Days

The free content side of things is great for a new blog where you really need to build a foundation of content in a hurry. I’d recommend at least two to three days of automatically accepting any articles with at least 30% rewrite. Once the new blog has 15 or so posts from the SEOLinkVine, the you can turn on manual acceptance.

I’ve found that you should choose your categories carefully. I accepted articles under the appliance category thinking it would offer articles about appliances for an appliance repair website – and wound up with a bunch of articles about plumbers.

The article distribution side of things is starting to look a bit more promising. The key, obviously, is the continued submission of unique articles. You’re not going to build a 100 backlinks with one or two well-spun articles.

So far I have submitted 62 variations of 8 articles and here are the stats so far:

Submitted for approval (62)

[Submissions occur everyday automatically]

Approved (15)

Rejected (34) [Blog owners can reject an article for any reason, so this number will likely always seem high]

Pending (13) [Blog owners have 30 days to accept or reject an article or else it is automatically published]

Published (9) [Backlinks just waiting to happen. Quality will almost certainly vary, but the process is fairly automated once you get the article written and spun]

This is a tiny sample size, but basically we could start to assume that about 1 in four [15/62 accepted – and ultimately published] articles will result in a published backlink every three days. Doing the math, if we had 100 articles (with an average of 4 variations each) then we would feasibly expect to distribute 100 articles every three days. At this rate, we could get 1000 backlinks a month.

Now we’ll have to see what my SEO Spyglass software says about the quality of the links. It will take a few weeks to get a clearer picture of this aspect.

Third Impressions – One Week Later

As I improve my knack for spinning articles using the integrated spinner, I have found that the acceptance rate of articles is improving dramatically. It is beginning to truly look like you can get out of the system what you put into it.

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Paul Dumas is the founder, owner and head geek @ The Optimized Marketing Group. The Internet marketing company specializes in website design, local search optimization, reputation management and social media consulting for small businesses, non-profits and municipalities throughout North Texas.